Hypothesis: It seems VMWare virtual machines, when left running in the background while interacted with all day through http/ftp and ssh, have a tendency to fragment over time to the extent that disk reads take too long for VMWare to read, causing it to yield the gruesome

“Warning: the system was unable to load a page of memory; this can be caused by network problems or a failing hard disk drive.”

Instead of working on Teamforge this evening, I found myself freeing up 13GB of hard disk space (I had a total of 2GB free before. Those of you with the math skillz now know the deplorable size of my hard drive) defragmenting the disk. Hopefully I’m right and the virtual machine will resume normal operating normally after this is finished.

I suppose this is a good night to chill and read a bit from Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide by Dave Thomas, Chad Fowler, and Andy Hunt.

Conclusion: Defragmenting the disk did not help. I suspect this is due to the fact that the virtual machine’s files could not be defragmented…. I assume they were in use by some process. Deleting 564d09c5-814d-c273-dc07-0b603299df80.vmem and 564d09c5-814d-c273-dc07-0b603299df80.vmem.lck however, however, fixed the problem. Something weird is definitely going on with my computer today though :-/

Well it’s been a busy 26 days here at Icecraft since my last post to Skin Deep. I’ve been hard at work on the Teamforge framework among other projects, and while it doesn’t look like much yet, I’m proud to announce that there is finally a site online at http://teamforge.org! This week I’ll be working to implement a search engine that saves your searches to build a customized feed of only the opportunities that interest you. A major source of frustration throughout my early freelancing career has been the time wasted jumping from site to site scanning visually through thousands of jobs that are of absolutely no interest to me, so in my opinion this is an exciting feature and a great way to kick off the site.

I’d like to take a moment to thank my friend Brian Callahan for his contributions to the new Icecraft logo. If you’re looking for a talented graphic designer, you owe this guy an email. Seriously.

As a final note: Under no circumstance should you ever give GoDaddy money. They are literally the worst shared hosting provider I’ve ever used in my life, and the worst company I have to deal with on a day to day basis (and that’s saying something - Verizon is my wireless provider!). I’m shocked and amazed every time something actually works the way I expect it to.